Hi, this is Monica Reinagle, and you're listening to the nutrition divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

Lee writes, there are a lot of calculators out there that are supposed to tell you how many

calories you should be eating, but they all give me different values.

So how do I know what my daily calorie intake should really be?

So if you've never come across one of these calculators yourself,

here's how they work.

You enter in your height, weight, age, gender, and activity level,

and the calculator tells you how many calories you

burn each day and from that you can extrapolate how many calories you should be

eating. For example if you're happy with your current, then you would eat the same number of calories that you burn each day.

And if you want to lose weight, you'd want to eat less than that maintenance number.

And obviously, if your goal is to gain weight, you'd eat more.

It all sounds simple enough.

But if different calculators give you different results, even when you're plugging in all the

same information, how do you know which one you can trust?

Well, these calculators use various formulas to estimate the calorie expenditure for a typical

person of your age, height, weight, and so on.

Different calculators yield different answers because they may use different formulas.

So which one can you trust to give you an accurate number?

Answer? None of them.

Several times a week, I get emails from readers

who want me to tell them exactly how many calories they can eat

...